Published: December 17, 2025
by Justin Difazzio
Last month we tackled the eight elements of holistic SEO, practices which help make you more likely to appear in search engine results. This month we’re tackling the flip side of that in a short additive blog to make sure you don’t end up on the SEO naughty list. There are plenty of SEO practices that sites engage in that are frowned upon by the folks at Google. If you don’t want to find yourself banned from appearing in results, make sure you aren’t engaging in any of these practices.
1. Keyword Stuffing
When you pick an SEO keyword or phrase for your content, you want to use it in your title, body, headlines, and maybe image captions. So you might think that jamming as many instances of that word or phrase would rocket you up the SEO rankings. And yet, too many instances of your keyword can get you penalized for keyword stuffing, which is exactly what it sounds like—just having keywords blasting out all over the place til they’ve lost all meaning. Don’t do that. And don’t try to fool anyone with a bunch of text the same color as your background, because although visitors might not see that, we can guarantee the SEOverlords do, and they don’t like it.
2. Buying or Trading Links
We don’t know about you, but we often get emails and comments from people asking us to check out their blogs, websites, etc. and these inevitably turn into sales pitches where they want us to pay for them to link back to our website. Now, other people linking to your website can be good for SEO, but you can’t fool the machine. They know what sites are garbage, and associating with the kind of community who buys and trades links can drop your SEO ratings and land you in the same estimation as these link hunters. Not a good look, honestly.
3. Spammy Backlinks
In the same vein as the last point, even if the sites that link to you or that you link to aren’t paid for or swapped, if they’ve been deemed spammy or otherwise nefarious, it will have the same effect—demotion to the naughty list. Just make sure you check out the places you’re linking to are relevant, up to date, and of a decent quality. No matter how desperate you are to include a link, it’s not worth it to tie yourself to a bad partner.
4. Page Swapping
We don’t see this as much as we used to, but sometimes a website will get a bunch of hits on one page and try to take advantage of that by replacing the content on that popular page with something else. It’s sort of a bait-and-switch play, and it really makes the SEO gods upset. Don’t try to pull a fast one on them or your viewers, because no one likes to go to a website that promises one thing and gives them another.
5. Duplicate Content
Jamming different pages or even different websites with the same content is another no-go when it comes to nailing your SEO game. Crawlers look for unique content, quality pages that fulfill their promises, and when they see the same copy on multiple pages, they generally penalize that. So try to keep it unique, fresh, and interesting.
6. Duplicate Content
Just kidding.
Nefarious SEO practices change and evolve as often as SEO rules seem to, so make sure you’re up to date on your dos and don’ts. If it feels like cheating at SEO, it probably is. And if the web crawlers haven’t penalized that specific behavior, chances are they’re working on it. Better safe than sorry, as getting back in good graces is often a difficult road. But you never have to worry about getting back on the nice list if you’re never put on the SEO naughty list in the first place, right?